Introduction

The notion of query performance prediction is straightforward. It refers to inferring the retrieval performance of a given query.

Some popular prediction methods

The query performance prediction methods can be classified into two categories: post-retrieval prediction and pre-retrieval prediction.

Post-retrieval prediction

In a post-retrieval prediction process, the prediction happens after the first-pass retrieval. In particular, it involves the use of relevance scores. Following are some popular post-retrieval prediction methods:

Pre-retrieval prediction

The pre-retrieval performance prediction uses the descriptive features of a given query, such as the idf factors and the composing query terms, to predict the query performance. The prediction process happens before the first-pass retrieval takes place, and does not have the need for relevance score. (He & Ounis, SPIRE2004) and (Plachouras et. al, TREC2004) introduced a list of Pre-retrieval Query Performance Predictors. Moreover, (Kwok et. al., TREC2004) applied the SVR for Query Performance Prediction using pre-retrieval query features